COCO Captions
Gemma 3 27B 116.0 leads since March 2025 Models write a caption for each image, and outputs are compared with five human captions per image using BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, and CIDEr.
Model cards usually report CIDEr, which is not a percentage.
- Made by
- Microsoft COCO
- Released
- April 2015
- Kind
- Detection and captioning
- Level
- Everyday
- Scored
- Checked automatically
- Answers
- Open-ended
- Tasks
- Public, plus a private test set
- Strongest model tested
- Gemma 3 27B #164 on the capability index
- Last in a launch post
- March 2025, dropped before it saturated
- Last model added
- March 2025
In the authors’ words
In this paper we describe the Microsoft COCO Caption dataset and evaluation server. When completed, the dataset will contain over one and a half million captions describing over 330,000 images. For the training and validation images, five independent human generated captions will be provided. To ensure consistency in evaluation of automatic caption generation algorithms, an evaluation server is used. The evaluation server receives candidate captions and scores them using several popular metrics, including BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE and CIDEr. Instructions for using the evaluation server are provided.
Gemma 3 27B leads with 116.0 among models released by March 2025
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
The newest model with a score here came out in March 2025, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- Claude Fable 5.2
- Gemini 4 Carbon
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- and 16 more
- 1 Gemma 3 27B 116.0
- 2 Gemma 3 12B 111.0
- 3 Gemma 3 4B 102.0
Source: Labs’ model cards
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gemma 3 27B | 116.0 | Mar 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 2 | Gemma 3 12B | 111.0 | Mar 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 3 | Gemma 3 4B | 102.0 | Mar 2025 | Lab model card |
Number one over time
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Source: Labs’ model cards
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Source: Labs’ model cards
No launch post has listed it since March 2025
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 12, 2025 | Gemma 3 27B | 116 | COCOcap (PT) |
3 system cards report it, from 1 lab
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 25, 2025 | Gemma 3 4B technical report | 102 | COCO caption, CIDEr, PT, 4-shot, val split without P&S (Table 11) | Capabilities |
| Mar 25, 2025 | Gemma 3 27B technical report | 116 | COCO caption, CIDEr, PT, 4-shot, val split without P&S (Table 11) | Capabilities |
| Mar 25, 2025 | Gemma 3 12B technical report | 111 | COCO caption, CIDEr, PT, 4-shot, val split without P&S (Table 11) | Capabilities |
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